MacMost Now 891: Customizing Your Desktop With GeekTool

The free GeekTool app allows you to put images, file content and shell script output right on your Desktop background. You can use this to customize your desktop in a variety of ways, such as showing current weather, news or financial information. Or, you can use it to monitor your Mac or systems on the Internet.

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 891: Customizing Your Desktop With GeekTool”

    John Pearson
    11 years ago

    Love the idea of geek tool and this was a good video tutorial. Unfortunately, when I downloaded geektool it did not work. I have a new iMac, so it should work fine. I could add an image to the desktop, and a local image worked fine. However, when I added a url as you showed in the video, nothing happened, and the radar image (from the url I added) didn't appear in the image box. Nothing did. All of the sudden, from what seemed a cool new thing for the desktop, it became a useless waste of time.

    Lee
    11 years ago

    Can you share the text that was used to get the date and time all in one Geeklet?

    James M. Gross
    11 years ago

    Hi Gary,

    Great video describing GeekTool. Thank you.

    How do you spell the GeekTool applets? I want to use it as a search term to find more of them.

    Also, Is there a listing, available, with descriptions of Shell calls. "Date" was a great example for me.

    Thanks in advance. Keep up the great videos!

      11 years ago

      I don't know of any list of applets or shell commands off the top of my head -- but a quick search should turn up each of those.

    James M. Gross
    11 years ago

    Hi Gary,

    One more question . . . .

    The weather image which updates, do you have to use a refresh time? If so, what rate would it be?

    Again, thanks.

      11 years ago

      Use whatever rate you want. If a web site updates an image every hour, then you can use once per hour, for example.

    Shel
    11 years ago

    I am running Snow Leopard and have been unable to download a version of Geektool that works... Any suggestions I have gone to tynsoe.org and tried two versions there. ????

      11 years ago

      Sorry, no suggestions. I'm not using Snow Leopard on any Macs anymore, so I can't try it myself.

    John C Stires
    11 years ago

    I'm having the same experience that Person described (10.8.4). I copy and paste the NWS URL and... nada. I can put pics in without trouble but not URLs. It's as if it's waiting for me to push a "Done" button or something. (http://www.weather.gov/satellite)

    John C Stires
    11 years ago

    OK, delete previous comment; it's for PICTURES (jpg's), an URL that is a picture. Not live URLs; got it!

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